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Freeze Frames of Canada’s Ice Huts

Freeze Frames of Canada’s Ice Huts

Credit Richard Johnson

Freeze Frames of Canada’s Ice Huts

By Eric NagourneyDec. 30, 2014Dec. 30, 2014

Richard Johnson likes ice fishermen just fine. He has shared drinks with them. He has learned a bit about their lives while crammed into the huts where they carve out small patches of warmth from the bitter expanse of cold outside.

But when Mr. Johnson grabs his camera gear and heads out over the ice, he is — nothing personal — happy to find no one home. As a rule, he is there to photograph the huts, not the people who use them.

“I can get a clean shot of the shack,” he says. “I like it when it has that desolate feel.”

For the past eight years, Mr. Johnson, who is based in Toronto, has hit the road in the winter, traveling the breadth of Canada to photograph the shelters people use for ice fishing on lakes and bays. To date, he has made it to nine of Canada’s 10 provinces.

By background a commercial interior designer who became an architectural photographer, he is attracted to the simplicity of the structures.

“It is architecture at its most primitive level,” he says. “It’s shelter. It’s portable. It’s made by the owners of the hut. It’s not pretentious. It is a solution. Every single person needs heat.”

The huts have openings in the floor, and the fishermen cut holes through the ice, the size varying depending on whether they are using a line or a spear.

Mr. Johnson, himself, is not much of a fisherman. “I find it takes a lot of patience,” he says, “and I tend to want to keep moving.”

He has photographed more than 700 huts, his ideal conditions an overcast day with light snow. He finds he often needs to retouch the photos — not to add color but to remove it. “There’s a lot of yellow snow,” he says.

For an ice hut photographer, the hazards are pretty much the same as they are for the fishermen themselves. The cold can be brutal. And then there is the tricky nature of the ice, which can groan as it shifts and even rises and falls in tidal bodies of water. Mr. Johnson has never fallen through, but there have been some “moments,” as he puts it.

The huts can take many forms. Some are simple, some decked out. Many show touches of humor. And most, in one way or the other, say something about the people who use them.

“For me,” Mr. Johnson says, “these are really portraits of the individual. But the individual is not present.”